ARWU 2015: Indian Universities stand nowhere in global rankings

What came as a national disappointment, only a single university was included in the top 500 university rankings released by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University under the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, being the only university to make it to the list, ranks as low as post 300.

Maintaining the stance, IISc in the rankings of 2003-2004 was still the only entry from India. However, it ranked much higher at 200. According to the list, eight universities out of the top 10 belong to the UK and US alone and also constitute more than 51 in the total survey. ARWU ranks more than 1,200 universities out of which the top-most 500 are published.

Harvard University emerged as the number one globally, for the 13th consecutive year. It was followed by Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Princeton, Caltech, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford. Denmark saw the rise of University of Copenhagen as it overpowered the Pierre & Marie Curie in France as the second best university in this region.

University of Tokyo at the position 21 and Kyoto University at rank 26, emerged as the leading universities in Asia. University of Melbourne topped other universities in Oceania, with rank 44.

The universities that made appearance for the first time in the top 500 are University of Warwick, Queensland University of Technology in Australia and Sharif University of Technology in Iran.

The reason for India lagging behind is apparently below-average contribution in the global research output, which accounted to a mere 3.5 percent. India’s share of world output stood at around 2 percent in 2010, while it was 17 percent for China. The Academic Ranking of World Universities judges on the basic concept of the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes, along with the number of stories published in journals of Science and Nature. India, sadly, fails miserably in all respects.